Hugh McCullom / Portfolio
Environment & Technical Artist

Building worlds from the structure up.

15+ years spanning shipped AAA retail titles and large-scale real-time production — from hand-painted environment art to the Unreal Engine pipelines, materials, and lighting systems that let teams hit that bar at scale. Trained as an architect first; it's still the lens everything gets built through: space, structure, and how light moves through both.

BasedSouthern California
CurrentLead Technical Artist, Magnopus
Est.2010 — present

Personal Projects

self-directed
9 photos

Cathedral

Personal Project · Unreal Engine · Modular Environment Study

A modular environment study built from as few unique materials as possible, with every texture authored in Substance Designer. Designed around an original concept — a strange object of worship whose ownership has divided a society — the space is kept stark and empty to hold focus on that object, lit throughout by candlelight in a medieval mood.

Environment Art
  • Modular pieces built once materials were finished in Substance Designer
  • Surface relief hand-painted as height maps in Photoshop, run through Sobel normal/AO nodes over the marble material for detail
  • Modular meshes designed around how the tools would reuse and place them across the space
Technical Art
  • Used PCG to build a layout tool for placing the cathedral's modular pieces
  • Built a Blueprint chandelier tool that instances chain links from a base hanging point
  • Built a simple system for adjusting every candle's lighting in the scene at once
  • Lit with warm candlelight and cool sky-fill through the windows, dark shadows drawing focus to the arches and dome, with light shafts through the windows inspired by gothic cathedrals worldwide
  • Built VFX for thick medieval candle flames with shimmer and floating embers, drifting dust motes for scale and atmosphere, and a glowing particle aura around the central idol
PersonalEnvironment ArtTechnical Art
12 photos

Valley Borough

Personal Project · Unreal Engine · PCG Framework

A large-world study in Unreal Engine 5 built to deepen my pipeline, procedural, and modular-asset skills — a landscape canvas seeded through art-directable procedural placement tools, plus custom pipeline tooling to speed imports from DCCs into Unreal.

Environment Art
  • Assets built in Maya, Photoshop, and Tree It
  • Scene placement and construction driven mostly by PCG tooling and the landscape tool
  • Textures hand-painted in Photoshop for a crafted feel; architecture and props modeled in Maya; vegetation created in Tree It
Technical Art
  • Built a Python tool to spherize normals on Tree It canopy verts and auto-name models by species variant
  • Developed a landscape material with automatic slope-based breakup, plus maskable override layers that blend using the base material's own rules
  • Built a PCG tool set, based on the Biomes PCG tool, that places trees and vegetation along a spline with growth controls
  • Lit for a moody night scene — a large moon casting blue-shifted shadows, offset by warm candlelight marking paths and points of interest
PersonalEnvironment ArtTechnical Art
8 photos

Dwarfs Cottage

Personal Project · Hand-Painted Textures & High-Poly Baking

A study inspired by Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cottage. Textures were hand-painted, with high-poly meshes baked down for normal detail; foliage was built and baked specifically for the camera. Lighting relies on light cards and old-school placed lights for bounce.

Environment Art
  • Built in Maya, ZBrush, xNormal, and Photoshop
  • Started from a grey-box pass to define the asset list and high-poly sculpt breakdown
  • Sculpted in ZBrush, then baked to height/AO/color and normal maps before final assembly
  • Built mostly from tileable textures, with vertex painting to blend terrain and assets
Technical Art
  • Focused on clean vertex blending to break up mesh/ground intersections
  • Built water materials with convincing refraction and reflection
  • Built a dedicated material for the light shafts, rendered as geo cards through the trees
  • Lit to recreate the original cottage scene — a deep-woods clearing on a sunny day, directional light angled toward the house for believable shafts, rim light on silhouettes, and fog deepening to blue between the distant trunks
PersonalEnvironment ArtTechnical Art

Studio & Professional Work

Magnopus, Disney, Abyss, High Impact Games, Robomodo

Fortnite: Daft Punk Experience

Magnopus · Lead Technical Artist · Released
Project Link ↗

Recreated Daft Punk's 2007 Alive concert inside Fortnite.

Technical Art
  • Set up extensible artist materials and documented team standards, cutting reliance on one maintainer
  • Built the Dream Chamber audio-mixing system on top of Fortnite's Jam system
  • Maintained lighting and look scalability across platforms; led memory & performance optimization fleet-wide
  • Worked directly with Epic to maintain and fix issues before, during, and after launch
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Wizard of Oz at Sphere

Magnopus · Lead Technical Artist · Released
Project Link ↗

Rebuilt The Wizard of Oz with AI for the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Technical Art
  • Built Unreal Engine tools to remove friction from the complex asset start & submission process for artists
  • Contributed to the AI pipeline and asset creation
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Cyberpunk: A Virtual Production Experience

Magnopus · Technical Artist · Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Project Link ↗

Built a VR experience for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, giving visitors a hands-on glimpse into virtual production — set in the world of Blade Runner.

Technical Art
  • Led project organization and maintained naming conventions
  • Built and maintained materials with all expected attributes and parameters
  • Led the team's optimization effort to bring performance back to target frame rate
  • Created the intro Blueprint logic for building the world
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Fortnite: Times Square Takeover

Magnopus · Senior Technical Artist · Delivered
NDA Asset

A Fortnite experience built around a real-world Times Square takeover, supported by a custom video pipeline and previsualization tooling for broadcast and live-event delivery.

Technical Art
  • Built an FFmpeg-powered Python pipeline to process 38+ video sequences into Unreal
  • Optimized previsualization scenes for broadcast and live-event planning with large-world tooling
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Karol G — Fortnite Concert

Magnopus · Senior Technical Artist · Released
Project Link ↗

Built a concert experience in Fortnite for Karol G.

Technical Art
  • Improved artist-friendly material workflows
  • Maintained lighting and look scalability across every Fortnite-supported platform
  • Led memory and performance optimization across the platform fleet
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Fallout TV Show

Magnopus · Technical Artist · Virtual Production, Amazon Prime
Project Link ↗

Built the virtual sets in Unreal Engine used on the video walls for Fallout's virtual-production shoots.

Technical Art
  • Maintained and enhanced virtual-production materials
  • Built an Unreal Engine plugin to streamline deployment of VP materials
  • Developed a camera-projected UV tool for matte-painting projection onto 3D objects
  • Built LUT-based color correction tools to resolve tone-mapping issues in Unreal
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Disney Remembering

Magnopus · Technical Artist · AR Companion App, Disney+
Project Link ↗

Built an AR app that pairs with Disney's Remembering film, bridging the movie and reality through iPhone and iPad.

Technical Art
  • Created all growth/reveal materials with parameters and textures for easy art direction
  • Implemented growth materials driven by scripted events
  • Helped move assets from an Unreal Engine prototype into the Unity project
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Sobibor — Holocaust Museum LA

Magnopus · Technical Artist · AR Installation
Project Link ↗

Built an AR copy of the Sobibor camp model that visitors can project onto any surface, paired with written, video, and interactive points of interest.

Technical Art
  • Built a blend between forest and camp, since the real camp was destroyed and forest has since reclaimed the site
  • Built a hologram texture used for the docent
  • Created children and a baby among the figures, to show the camp held more than adults
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Unannounced UEFN Project

Magnopus · Senior Technical Artist · Delivered, not released
NDA Asset

An unreleased, NDA-protected project built in UEFN.

Technical Art
  • Built scalable, artist-friendly materials for visual fidelity across platforms
  • Developed lighting and look-dev across platforms
  • Led memory and performance optimization fleet-wide
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Meta VR Project

Magnopus · Technical Artist · Light Baking Pipeline
NDA Asset

An NDA-protected VR project at Magnopus, centered on a custom light-baking pipeline.

Technical Art
  • Designed and built a light-baking pipeline using Maya, Arnold Render, OpenImageIO, and Python through Deadline distributed rendering
  • Automated asset preparation for baking and Perforce integration
ProfessionalTechnical Art

Unannounced MMO

Disney Interactive · Environment Artist · 2012
NDA Asset

An unannounced MMO at Disney Interactive, built under NDA.

Environment Art
  • Built environments for an unannounced MMO, keeping a cohesive art style across the team
  • Partnered with engineers to simplify the asset pipeline, speeding iteration for the wider environment art team
ProfessionalEnvironment Art
10 photos

Tiki Galore

Abyss Studios · Founder / Environment & Technical Artist · Shipped on Steam, Oct 2015

Co-op/PvP arena game built in Unreal Engine, selected by Epic Games for the 2014 EGX London showcase. Play a tiki whose island conflict runs from ancient myth to a dangerous present, in dark-souls-light open-world combat with craftable weapon customization — PvE quests chase down crafting reagents while PvP opens story-driven quest invasions between players. I personally built the environment art, gameplay systems, VFX, and UI; shown here is the environment and set-dressing work.

Environment Art
  • High-poly props, rocks, and characters sculpted in ZBrush or Maya, baked down and finished in Substance Painter, then assembled in Maya
  • Vegetation built the same way, with final assembly in Tree It
  • Modular tileable environment materials built in Substance Designer, assembled into modular assets in Maya
Technical Art
  • Built the dark-souls-light combat system on Unreal's Gameplay Ability System
  • Built a crafting system designed for maximum customization
  • Built tools to speed up world iteration for combat and quest design
  • Built master materials with extensibility in mind to manage shared attributes across assets
  • Built VFX around heavily shared parameters
ProfessionalEnvironment ArtTechnical Art
8 photos

DreamWorks Super Star Kartz

High Impact Games · 2011–2013 · Shipped — Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, Nintendo 3DS

A DreamWorks kart-racing game with power-ups to shoot at other racers across iconic DreamWorks movie locations. I built the environments and race tracks for Far, Far Away (Shrek), Dragon's Lair, Isle of Berk, and Dragon's Keep (How to Train Your Dragon).

Environment Art
  • Pipeline ran from hand-painted textures in Photoshop to level building in Maya, for a proprietary engine across Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and 3DS
  • Built VFX to enhance level immersion — falling debris, leaves, confetti, balloons, and other particle effects
ProfessionalEnvironment Art
8 photos

Tony Hawk: SHRED

Robomodo · 2010 · Shipped — Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii

Contributed environment and asset creation for a shipped, multi-platform retail title. Promoted from the animation team into environment art partway through production; increased texel density and fidelity on existing level assets.

Environment Art
  • Levels built from modular assets to limit overhead and support larger worlds
  • Pipeline ran from hand-painted textures in Photoshop to level building in Softimage XSI, for a proprietary engine across Xbox 360 and PS3
  • Worked on the Haunted Mansion, the Carnival, the Alpine Slopes, and Morocca levels
ProfessionalEnvironment Art